Broken
by MomoOfficial
Summary: An injury and a return to hell. This is a story about trust. The sequel to "Innocent," AU android!Wheatley/Chell.
1. Chapter 1

She was furious with him.

Chell slammed her open palm against the kitchen counter and bit her lip to keep from crying.

"Oh, are you bringing out the tears? You know that won't work!" Wheatley's voice, despite his anger, was shaky. "Y-You're doing that to make me break. It's not working, love! It's not!"

He was pressed against the wall near the door, screaming at her. He wasn't within touching distance of her; he never got that close when he was angry with her.

Chell shook her head and darted towards the doorway. He reached out an arm and caught her, keeping his grip firm on her shoulders.

"You're not letting me do anything!" he cried. "I can hardly touch you! Have the nightmares come back? Is that it?"

Chell shook her head and, trembling, pushed his hands away. He let go of her with no resistance.

"What are you so frightened of, then? You're hurting me, Chell!"

She took her coat off of the back of the sofa and threw it on. She took her knife off the desk. She pulled the hood of her coat over her head, put her knife in her pocket, and braced herself.

"Where are you going? No!"

She wrenched the front door open and flew across the porch and down the front steps.

"Chell!"

She stopped in the middle of the street. It was a clear night, but the early spring air was biting, and she wasn't wearing much. The breeze gusted over her bare toes, and she shivered.

She looked towards the house. Wheatley was in the doorway, his hands pressed against the doorframe. His back was slumped over; he looked beaten up.

"I'm not through with you!" he shouted, even as his own eyes brimmed with tears. "Where are you going?"

She shook her head and backed away.

"Are you leaving me? You can't leave!" He lurched towards her, and she took a few more steps back. "You can't…leave me…alone…"

She bit her lip and shook her head again.

Then she turned and fled down the dusty road.

"Chell!" he called after her, over and over again. "Chell!"

Eventually the wind swallowed up his voice.

* * *

She paced the streets for the rest of the night. As the sun was rising, she collapsed in the empty doorway of a store.

Chell squeezed her eyes shut and bared her teeth.

She didn't know what had overcome her back at the house; perhaps it was the overwhelming feeling of being _safe_, the predictable routine, how he was genuinely happy to see her open her eyes every morning.

Maybe she was looking for more trouble. Her days in Aperture had been difficult, but at least she had been engaged in doing something. She had spent so much of her life constantly feeling like she was going to get killed that spending an entire day gazing out a window with someone's arms around her felt alien and so very _wrong_.

But that didn't mean she was justified in pushing him away.

He fed her, talked to her, explored with her. At night, he held her to him and kissed her and explored the planes of her body with wonder. He let her touch him, ruffle his hair, hold his hand; she let him chase after her and catch her and spin her around with a giddy laugh.

And early the other morning, she had woken up in a cold sweat and looked at him paging through a book next to her and felt a weight in her stomach, and after that it had all gone to hell.

She sniffled and wiped a few tears away. She looked behind her through the shop's glass door.

If she was going to run away, she might as well feed herself first.

A small, rusted bell jingled as she opened the door and tiptoed in. There was broken glass everywhere from the shattered front window, and she kept an eye on her feet as she moved through the destroyed store. It had been a bakery at one point, and though bread could only sustain her for so long, it would suffice until she could find something better.

Finding bread that wasn't molded over was a challenge. She sat down behind the counter and picked through the display case, discarding pastries and loaves that were inedible.

As she sifted through the ruined food, she cursed herself for being picky. Some of this she would have eaten before she had gone back to Aperture so many months ago and found Wheatley and the Space Core. She had been spoiled since. She had gone soft, just as she had feared.

Maybe, she thought, examining a loaf of bread that was half-preserved, half-black and blue, she could leave this town and keep wandering through the wheat fields. See if she couldn't get away for a while. She didn't want to leave him, but on the other hand, the safety was grating on her.

She threw the loaf to the floor and looked up.

The bakery was several stories high. Crates loomed in jagged towers towards the high vaulted ceiling. The entire store looked as if it had been a chapel once before getting converted.

On top of one stack of crates was a pile of bread that was vacuum-sealed. It could still be fresh enough to eat.

Chell rose from her sitting position and stared up at the bread. The only ladder in the entire bakery was rotted beyond belief; it wouldn't support her weight. The crates, however, provided some handholds, and looked heavy enough to support her.

She could climb her way up.

She set her knife down on the counter and walked over to the crates. She took a hold of one corner, placed her foot on the side of the crate below it and hefted herself up.

Chell began to climb.

Handholds, as it turned out, were few, despite her initial examination of the stack. She took her time scaling the crates, looking down at her feet every so often to check her grip. Every time she looked up to gauge her progress, it seemed as if the stack had gotten bigger when she hadn't been looking.

She grit her teeth and pressed on.

When she neared the top, she stopped a crate away and reached for the bread.

The crate her feet were on groaned.

Chell stretched as far as she could go.

Then the crate slipped.

Chell found herself in the air, spiraling towards the concrete ground at an alarmingly fast rate. She twisted and writhed frantically as the crates from the stack fell around her.

The concrete floor rose up to meet her, and as she hit the ground, she heard a sickening _crack_, followed by the wooden _thump-thump-thump_ of the crates hitting the ground after her.

A searing pain shot through her body, and she opened her mouth wide in a silent scream of agony, tears already prickling at the corners of her eyes.

She laid against the ground, panting, waiting for the pain to calm down. It never did.

Chell struggled to sit up and cross her legs. When she moved her left leg, however, the pain shot through her again, stronger than ever, and she grunted and fell back to the floor.

Her leg was twisted at an unnatural angle. Her foot, completely lifeless, didn't respond to her attempts to move it, and every other attempted movement of her leg resulted in more pain.

Her leg was broken.

Chell gritted her teeth and tried to straighten herself out as best she could. Eventually she gave up and, lying against the concrete floor, struggled to re-focus her thoughts.

Now she could never go home.

Wheatley was going to worry himself sick.

She closed her eyes and gave a halting sigh: a sob.

That had been stupid of her, running away from him. He didn't know this town as well as she did; he couldn't go out in the snow or rain, so he hadn't seen as much of the streets as she had. What was he doing, alone in that house?

Did he miss her?

She pressed her palms against her eyes and sniffled.

She had to figure out a way to get out.


	2. Chapter 2

At least the bread was good.

She took another monster bite and chewed.

Chell had ripped her shirt and a nearby crate to shreds using her knife and teeth. Over the course of a few hours and with a lot of wincing, she made a splint for her broken leg, then replaced the knife in her front pocket. The pain subsided to a dull aching. There was a small but angry-looking red cut on the side of her calf that didn't look as if it would go away anytime soon; she padded the wound as best she could with the scraps of her shirt, and let it be. She dragged herself towards the window and settled, just out of sight of the street outside, her coat protecting her against the wind.

She tried to sit up; her head spun. She lay back down and closed her eyes. The dehydration and exhaustion would get to her soon, she knew that; she'd have to get off of this floor and try and move with her injury if she wanted to stay alive.

She struggled to sit up on her elbows, managed that far, then waited for the dizziness to go away.

Then she heard something outside.

It was so faint she could have imagined it, but after a pause, the sound came again, louder this time. Through the haze of her exhaustion and pain, she strained her ears and fought to stay awake.

There was silence.

Then a long, needy howl ripped through the streets.

"CHELL!"

The scream lasted for an incredibly long time. It was hoarse and tinged with static, and so full of pain.

Chell raised herself up higher, ignored the new shoot of pain through her broken leg.

The scream was even closer the second time around.

"CHELL!"

A sob.

"Please, Chell! Please! Where are you? I've been looking for ages, and I…"

A deep breath.

"CHELL!"

Before the owner of the voice dissolved into hysterical sobbing.

"Please come back," he murmured, his voice now high and faint and nearly inaudible. "Please."

Chell's eyelids fluttered, and she nearly collapsed. She grabbed the corner of a nearby crate to keep her balance.

It slid along the floor.

"Chell?"

Chell forced her eyes open. He was listening. She shuffled the crate along the concrete again.

There were a few tentative footsteps. "Chell, is that you?"

Chell shuffled the crate again, then banged on its side. The hollow thumps resonated through the store.

The footsteps started up again, crunched over broken glass, then stopped by the shattered window.

Wheatley leaned over the window sill and stared at her with wide eyes. He hiccupped, and gave her a feeble smile that disappeared as fast as it came.

"What's happened to you?" he asked, then scanned the store briefly. "This place looks awful."

Chell smiled weakly and pointed to her leg. He looked down at it and swallowed.

He pulled himself over the windowsill and into the store. He crouched next to her and brushed his fingers against the injury. Chell let out a long sigh, fallling back against the concrete; the pain in her leg increased. The fatigue was taking her now: she hadn't had water for hours, and the bread wasn't doing much.

And there was a strange tingling feeling in the cut on her leg.

"Please, Chell, wake up." He gently shook her by the shoulders. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't open her eyes; the pain was too great, and her breathing became labored with the effort it took to bear it.

She shook her head slowly and grimaced.

"Oh, love…" His hand ghosted over her sweaty forehead.

He slipped one arm behind her back and the other under her knee; with a grunt and a mighty pull, he picked her up. "At least you're breathing," he said, "There's an upside."

He shifted his arm so that her legs were propped up. Chell's makeshift splint did a decent job of holding her leg and foot in place, but she felt the padding around her cut fell away.

She sighed again and let her head rest against his chest. She kept her eyes closed.

"There's a girl," he muttered to her. "You rest for a bit until I can get you back to the house. Wheatley's got this."

He carried her out.

"Look at you," he said gently to her as they walked through the streets. "Having a little run through the streets with no food. Except for the bread, you seemed to find that well enough."

Upon mention of the bread, she struggled in his arms.

"That's what you wanted?" He stopped in his tracks. She gave up and fell limp again. "That's what you broke your leg for?"

She nodded once.

He kept walking, picking his way among the trash in the streets.

Wheatley was taking some long, meandering path, but he was walking quickly. Chell hoped he was taking her back to the house and not deeper into the town; she had never given him a map, nor made one herself. She had always relied on smashing windows and putting temporary landmarks out in the road so they could find their way home.

"You know we have so much food. All the food you could possibly want! You found it all." His fingers tightened around Chell's side and legs, then released. "Why did you need more?"

Chell shook her head.

She felt Wheatley run up a few stairs. There was the heavy sound of his boots on wood, and then she was being jostled around and pressed against a hard surface. She opened her eyes.

"Th-the door," he said, and continued to reach for the knob. "Can you just…open that up for me? Got my hands a bit full."

She reached out a shaking hand and, using as much strength she could, opened the door to the house. He turned and pressed his back against the door to push it open further.

He made a beeline to the couch and laid her down there. Her head lolled to the side, and she shut her eyes again. She took a sharp breath when he reached down to stretch her legs out.

"I know, love, I know. Let's…there, put the victim's legs like that, and they said to…um…water! Yes. Are you thirsty?"

Chell nodded once, her eyes still squeezed shut. Her hand dived into her pocket and withdrew her knife; she handed it to him, and he took it from her.

"It's going to take some bravery on my part, handling that deadly liquid, but for you..."

There was a rustling in the kitchen and the sound of buckets being moved around.

Then a gentle hand propped her head up while another pressed porcelain to her lips. Chell drank down the rainwater in the bowl greedily.

"More?" he asked, and she nodded.

He gave her several more bowls of water, and then some meat, which she choked down.

"Just had a brainwave. I know you're not feeling well, so..."

His hands slid under her again, and Wheatley lifted her up, then sat down under her with her in his arms.

He turned her so that she was lying parallel to the couch, then lay down under her. He kept his back slightly propped up against the couch arm, and briefly leaned over her shoulder to fuss with her legs, keeping his on either side of her.

"Legs flat…there."

Chell leaned back against his chest, head resting on his shoulder, and took a shaking breath. She released it. She closed her eyes.

Her hands moved towards his. He took them firmly and intertwined their fingers before slipping both of their hands under her coat. He pressed them flat against her hips.

He brushed his lips against the crook of her neck.

"I'm so sorry, love," he breathed.

She struggled to turn around and look at him. He was avoiding her gaze.

She laughed and raised her eyebrows.

"For not coming to you sooner."

Chell shook her head and turned forward again. She withdrew a hand and reached behind her. As she ran a hand through his hair, he leaned down and kissed her neck.

She closed her eyes and smiled.

Wheatley nuzzled the crook of her neck, then slowly moved his head up and kissed the skin just behind her ear. He released her other hand and wrapped his arms around her waist.

She pushed herself to the side and tried to turn over, but a jolt went through her broken leg, and she fell against him.

"What's that?'' he asked, a note of alarm in his words. "You want to turn around?"

He leaned down and held her broken leg in place while he swung one leg, then the other, off the couch. Keeping her back to the couch cushions, he laid her down again.

Wheatley knelt on the carpet and leaned over her. She pulled his head towards her and pressed her lips against his. He reached under the coat and brushed the backs of his fingers against her bare stomach as he kissed her.

"You're so cold," he breathed when she pulled away. "Everything on you is cold."

He straightened and jogged up the stairs. He emerged with all of the blankets from her bed. The sheets trailed along the floor; Wheatley's eyes were barely visible above the pile of bedclothes.

She propped herself up on her elbows and watched him.

"Here we go, then!" He tossed all of the blankets on her in a heap; she helped him in smoothing everything out. She took a thinner sheet and bunched it up, then placed it underneath her head as a pillow.

"There!" He beamed at her. "Almost as good as the real thing. Oh!"

Wheatley pushed aside the bedclothes near her broken leg. "Let's take a look at this. May I?"

He pulled at the scraps of fabric holding the splint together. She nodded and leaned back against the couch as he untied them. Her eyes closed.

There was a long silence.

Then Wheatley screamed. Her eyes shot open.

"Love, is…is human blood supposed to be black?"

Wheatley was cowering on the floor some distance away, his eyes glued to her leg. She followed his gaze.

The cut had grown.

It ran the length of her calf and was covered in congealed blood; the edges of the wound were tinged black. There was a darkness to her blood, too, so much so that the resulting color seemed inhuman.

She reached out and touched the congealed blood covering the cut; it had the appearance of a scab, but was still incredibly soft under her fingers. Some black blood oozed out of the sides.

Despite the severity of the wound, it was completely numb.

"Don't touch it!" Wheatley crawled towards the couch and held out a hand. He leaned in and peered at it, his upper lip curled in disgust. "This wasn't in my manual about human injuries."

He shook his head and leaned back on his heels. His eyes traveled to hers, and his expression became sad. "I don't know what's happened to you."

Chell pointed to the desk and made a scribbling motion with her free hand. He fetched some paper and a pencil for her.

_I got this cut when I fell. There was broken glass, and a crate landed pretty hard on my leg._

"Was the cut this big when you got it, though?"

Chell thought. _No, _she wrote at last. _It was so much smaller._

Wheatley's eyes traveled to the cut again. He hissed through his teeth. "So it grew."

_And it wasn't black when I got it. It was red. I don't think blood turns black._

His eyes narrowed. "What was in that building?"

_Bread. A lot of moldy bread. Some good bread, but most of it had black mold on it._

He hissed through his teeth again and squeezed his eyes shut. "No, can't be…"

She took his shoulder in one hand, encouraging him to continue.

He looked down at his hands. "At one point, the scientists made bread mold that actually _preserved_ bread. I think we had a bread factory around for a bit." He paused, turned his eyes to the ceiling, thought for a bit. "But it was making a lot of people sick. It made their skin turn strange colors. A few scientists didn't make it after eating it."

She sat back on the couch.

He looked down at her leg. "They say it was already on the market by the time they learned it was killing people," he said. "And you may have eaten moldy bread. And your skin's turning strange colors. Which means…"

Chell's breath hitched.

He scooted over and placed his cheek on her stomach, his face contorted in pain. "I don't want you to go," he whispered to her.

She reached down and stroked his jaw. He whimpered and closed his eyes.

Then he sat straight up.

"Unless…"

His eyes darted from side to side. His CPU whirred quietly.

"The facility has a cure," he said finally, "in its labs somewhere. They used that to stop the big brains in science from dying. Don't know about this town, though," he added, "It looks done for. Hospitals probably ran out. But it is _definitely_ somewhere in the facility. Never saw it, but I know it's a liquid. And they have it."

Chell took up her pencil and paper.

_Do we have to go back?_

He stared at the paper for a while before the significance of the question hit him. He put a hand on the crown of her head.

"It's up to you, love. It's your leg."

Chell watched as more blood trickled out of the wound. It stained the white sheets underneath it an unearthly black.

If the mold was as bad as Wheatley implied, then, at the very least, she could lose her leg. That meant more difficulty finding food; Wheatley could only carry her so far, and chasing animals would be impossible. She could have eaten some of the mold by accident when she was back in the store as well.

She could lose her life.

She looked up at him. He was wringing his hands. He gave her a hopeful smile.

The thought of leaving him alone here, so appealing last night, now filled her with grief. If she died, then there would be no hope of her returning; he couldn't pace the streets and call for her to make her come back. She wouldn't get to see him. To not return to Aperture and get this cure would mean willfully abandoning him.

She looked down at her leg and nodded.

_Give me a day,_ she wrote, _and we'll go._


	3. Chapter 3

"And here's another." Wheatley turned around and reached for her hand. He placed a tiny crane in her palm.

"Now you have a little family!" Wheatley looked up at her and smiled.

Earlier, he had re-splinted her leg and helped her to the fireplace, where she started a fire to ward off the chilly rain outside. A few buckets were placed in the road ahead of time to collect water for the trip ahead.

Now she was lying on her back on the couch, nestled in her bed sheets, while Wheatley sat on the ground with his back to her and made cranes.

"And look at this! If you get clever, and place them here and here…" He arranged the cranes on her stomach in a line. "They're swimming in a lake of bedclothes. Devilishly inventive, if I do say so myself."

Chell reached out and, with one finger, traced the edge of the biggest crane's wings. She picked up her pencil and paper from her side.

_You're so good at these._

Wheatley's cheeks turned pink, and he chuckled. "Oh, love, you know…I do what I can. Practicing non-stop, you know."

_Will you teach me?_

She showed him the paper with a smile tugging at her lips.

Wheatley stuttered, then fell silent. He started at the paper with his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open, then looked at her with the same expression of comical disbelief. She was beginning to think that she short-circuited him when, quietly and feebly:

"Yes."

He nodded slowly.

"Yes, I can."

Then a smile split his face in two, and his nodding became more vigorous. "Yes, yes, yes, I can teach you! I can, I can. Oh, love, you bet. Paper, paper, where is it…"

He shoved a sheet of paper at her from the pile behind him. Fingers trembling, he took the cranes off her stomach and put them next to him on the floor. He smoothed out a sheet of paper on the flat plane of her belly.

"Alright, this _could_ get a bit technical, but I'll help you. Be there every step of the way. Make this fold first."

Wheatley coached her through the entire process. As they worked together, Chell kept her eye on him. The shaking in his hands and the breathless excitement in his voice never went away. He was all too eager to guide her hands with his own, and grinned and praised her when she executed a fold well.

Chell wondered if Wheatley had ever been asked for his opinion or expertise on anything, or whether Aperture had ever treated him like he knew anything at all. He was more than happy, even ecstatic, to help her, and the proud sweep of his hands when he showed her each fold in his own crane was impossible to miss.

She finished the last part of her crane and looked up. Her heart leapt.

He was giving her the gentlest look she had ever seen on him.

He seemed to snap out of a trance when she looked up at him. "All done." He held up his crane with a smile. His looked neater than hers, but he set his down in favor of taking her crane and holding it up to the firelight to admire. "You've done a right beautiful job, Chell. Expert work for someone who's never done this before."

Chell watched him gather all the cranes and painstakingly arrange them on the desk. While he had his back to her, she wrote another note.

_It's because I had a great teacher._

He returned and knelt on the floor near her head. He blinked at the note, then looked away. "Oh, you're saying that."

Chell put the paper down on the floor by him and brushed a thumb against his cheek. Slowly, his gaze travelled upwards to meet hers.

"I did that," he breathed. "I taught you something."

Chell nodded, then smiled as he closed his eyes, covered the back of her hand with his own, and rubbed his cheek against her palm.

He moved forward and rested his chin on the side of the couch. He stared at her while she repeatedly ran her hand through his hair.

That gentle look was back: it was reverent and unashamed, and even though Chell knew he was completely vulnerable to her, she also knew that she had given him some power. She wanted him to feel useful and loved; if she did leave, he had to know it was her own thirst for challenge that led her away. But she didn't want to leave now, especially not when he took her hand again and kissed the center of her palm and said, in a small voice, "Thank you." He curled her hand and pressed his forehead to the backs of her fingers, his eyes closing.

When he looked at her again, she nodded and mouthed, "Thank _you_."

He laughed sheepishly and grinned. "Oh, no trouble. Always glad to help."

She pushed herself up and beckoned him closer. His smile disappeared, and he looked at her sideways. She indicated a flat surface with her hands, then pointed to him, then to the couch.

"You…you want me to lie under you again?"

Chell nodded. She pointed to the fire and mimed thrusting a bucket towards it.

He picked her up and helped her to the fire again. Chell extinguished it with a small jar of water she kept nearby, taking extreme care not to splash him in the process. In the dark, they moved back to the couch, where he lay down and let her rest on top of him on her back.

He hesitantly pressed his lips to her temple. She reached behind her and pressed his hand against the back of his head. She could feel him smile against her skin before he eagerly rained kisses on her cheek and neck, his glowing eyes shut tight. She laughed silently.

She turned her head and, blind in the darkness of the house, accidentally kissed the bridge of his nose. He opened his eyes in response, and Chell used their blue light to find his mouth. He laughed and returned the kiss, his hands running up and down her sides.

When they broke apart, she turned around again and rested her head against his chest, just below his collarbone.

She fell asleep in his arms while he hummed a slow, cheery tune.

* * *

When the sun was barely up and the rain had stopped, he carried her to a clinic a small ways away from their house. After an hour of searching, they found crutches and a proper splint. He helped her back to the house and up the porch steps.

She filled a bag with as much food as possible, several large jars of rainwater, flint from the camping store in town, her knife, and her pencil and paper. On further thought. she dug up several waterproof coats for Wheatley in case it rained, and tucked them into a separate compartment of the bag.

Wheatley, being a robot and much stronger than her, carried the bag while she used her crutches to move. He helped her out of the house and down the front steps.

They stood in silence at the end of the street, staring off into the wheat fields together.

Wheatley looked back at their house a small distance away from where they stood. "I'll miss that house while we're gone," he said quietly.

Chell rubbed his arm soothingly. He sighed.

They walked forward.

* * *

Their trip was long but easy.

Using the ruins of the space ship and her own memory as a guide, Chell mapped out her route to Aperture using the method from her initial trip several months ago: she moved in the general direction of the shed. At night, she and Wheatley cleared small circles out of the wheat, where she slept and ate and he kept a watchful eye on the fields around them. The combination of campsites and her crutch marks kept them from going in circles.

She did the navigating while Wheatley carried their supplies behind them. It never rained, so the coats had no use, but Wheatley took a particular liking to a brown camouflage jacket and wore it through the entire trip.

He never stopped talking.

"Did you know that Aperture had facilities in other countries? Wish I could have worked in France. I can speak a little French. Well, no, I can't, but I could learn! Learned just fine with the cranes, can handle a wee bit of _baguette_ and _fromage_ and _amour_. You know that. Didn't we already go this way? Oh, no we didn't, there's the campsite behind us, I'm seeing things again. Remember when we first went through here, and you hated me, and I thought you were great if a little frigid, and now we spend all this time together and snog. Oh, ho, ho, mercy me. How times have changed. You're not frigid, you're perfectly lovely. Say, do you like this coat or the green one more? Which goes better with my eyes?"

And on and on.

And unlike their first trip through the wheat, Chell was grateful for the constant buzz of his voice a little ways behind her.

Eventually they were standing in front of the shed. Chell heard the words die in his throat when he looked at the corrugated steel door.

"This again," Wheatley muttered. "Not sure if this was the best idea I've ever had."

Chell shrugged and hobbled to the door. She pried it open.

The cool, damp darkness of the elevator shaft greeted them. Chell's eyes took a while to adjust to the dim light.

Then, finally, the sunlight from outside traced the outline of the elevator. Its glass had been replaced, and the machinery looked brand-new, worlds away from the shattered lift from her previous trip.

She swallowed. GLaDOS was dead. There was no way the repairs were her doing. It had to be Aperture's nanobots that fixed the glass.

Wheatley, oblivious to what she was staring at, took her hand and squeezed. "I know a lot happened here, love, but I know this place. I'll always be here."

She squeezed his hand back and looked down at her leg. Though she couldn't see the cut unless she removed the bandages (which she did every night to check on the wound), she knew it hadn't grown, but it was as gory as ever.

This was for him.

He kissed her cheek and stepped forward into the shed.

"And off we go."


	4. Chapter 4

Despite the brand-new glass, the elevator was as slow and halting as ever. Whoever had replaced the glass walls clearly hadn't seen to repairing the elevator shaft. No one was riding the elevator, anyway.

At least, Chell _thought_ no one was riding the elevator.

There could be someone here.

The tracks squealed as they moved down.

Wheatley huddled close to her in the tiny space. He clutched the strap of the bag with both hands and pressed his shoulder against hers. His eyes were glued to the elevator shaft; they shifted up and down periodically as the walls of the shaft moved past them, as if he was reading a book the wrong way.

Then he suddenly let go of the strap, letting the bag hang from his side, and removed his arm from one of the sleeves of the camouflage coat. He took Chell and gently pulled her closer to him. Chell stumbled on her crutches and raised an eyebrow, but remained still as he pulled the coat around them both and cowered next to her. She rubbed his cheek on his shoulder; he whimpered.

The turrets passed by. Wheatley watched them go without a word, but through his skin, Chell heard his fans kick up, perfectly timed with her own sharp gasp. She closed her eyes and waited.

The elevator ground on, until finally, it landed in Her chamber.

Coming back to the space where she had found him was surreal. She felt a stirring in the pit of her stomach as she took it in.

There was still a hole in the ceiling. The birds hadn't come back; something, perhaps, had scared them away. The wheat was scattered all over the chamber. Some water pooled in the corners. The smell of science was completely gone from this place now; the air was overrun with the smell of dirt, of sun, of Someplace Nicer.

And She was still dead.

To think, Chell had nearly left Wheatley and Space down here to die.

Wheatley let her hobble out first on her crutches before following her. She made a beeline to GLaDOS and stopped some distance away from Her. While she stared up at the broken machine, he walked to her, hung the coat around her shoulders, and stood behind her, hands on her shoulders, staring at GLaDOS with her.

"Dead as always," he muttered. Chell nodded.

Wheatley placed the bag next to her left crutch. He took a slow pace around GLaDOS's body. Chell carefully put the jacket on.

"I've never really gotten this close," he said, "without being made to." He stopped, looked up at the ceiling. "I mean…" He crinkled his nose. "No, I'm not going to talk about that," he added under his breath.

He continued to pace the chassis. He was thinking, she knew, judging by the slowness of his steps and the vacancy in his eyes.

He stopped, partially turned away from her, his hands clasped behind his back. He stared at GLaDOS's head. It faced the floor, looking almost sheepishly away from his thoughtful gaze.

"I have a plan, love," he said loudly, startling her, "but I don't think you're going to like it very much. In fact, I know you won't." He turned his head away and hunched his shoulders.

Chell moved to him. The methodical _tic-tic-tic _of her crutches was deafening in the cavernous room.

She placed a hand on his shoulder. He turned around, gave her a thin smile, and jerked his head in the direction of GLaDOS's head.

"Mind plugging me in?" he asked, his voice feeble and unsure through his smile.

Chell's eyes widened. She snatched her hand back.

"I promise," he said, and he put his hands on her shoulders. He hunched down to her eye level and stared at her while he spoke. The smile was gone. His eyes were bright blue and hesitant, almost frightened. There was a quaver in his voice. He was _pleading_.

"I promise I-I'll get you that cure. It'll be fast, love, fast as anything. I'll know where everything is if I'm plugged into _Her_ systems. S_he_ knew where everything was. I can find that cure and direct you to it, and then when we're finished, you can pop me out, and we can go home."

He smiled and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. Chell turned away. "You'll be better," he whispered. "All healthy and good as new. I'll fix you."

She looked up at the massive chassis, followed the lines of its twisting wires up to the ceiling. He knew the last time he had been plugged in, things had gone massively wrong. He didn't remember, but he _knew._

But they hadn't been this close when all of that had happened.

Things could really have changed since then.

She looked down, caught sight of his boots; they shuffled restlessly against the tile floor.

She closed her eyes and nodded.

"There we go!" He patted her on the shoulder, but she didn't open her eyes. Even so, she could _hear_ the thousand-watt grin he had on. "I'll make it up to you, love, I promise. I'll be the best ruler of this facility that you've ever seen. Even better than _Her_."

_Even better than_ Her.

Chell tried to breathe through the tightening in her chest.

He let go of her. "Now, let's see here…uh…"

She opened her eyes. He was facing away from her, looking up towards the ceiling.

"Maybe someone's awake here…there's always someone…"

He rubbed his hands together. "Uh…"

He raised his voice. "Requesting core transfer!"

No response.

"Um…core transfer. Now. Please."

No response.

He stood on his tip-toes, balled his hands into fists, and shrieked:

"INITIATE CORE TRANSFER!"

"CORE TRANSFER INITIATED," came a man's voice out of nowhere, making them both jump. Wheatley retreated behind Chell. "ALTERNATE CORE, ARE YOU READY TO START?"

Chell elbowed him sharply in the ribs.

"I, uh…yes!" Wheatley said from behind her.

"ORIGINAL CORE, ARE YOU READY TO START?"

GLaDOS, of course, remained silent.

"DEFECTIVE CORE DETECTED," the voice continued, sounding unusually chipper and yet so, _so_ bored at the same time. "A CORE TRANSFER ASSOCIATE IS NEEDED TO CONFIRM DEFECTIVENESS. PLEASE ATTACH THE REPLACEMENT CORE TO THE APERTURE SCIENCE CORE REPLACEMENT DEVICE BEFORE CONTINUING."

The chamber came alive.

Part of the floor slid away, and the Aperture Science Core Replacement Device, looking as much a futuristic torture device as ever, rose out of the ground. It was a long and thick silver plate, with silver restraints for the wrists and ankles that lay open, waiting, as the device came to a stop. One long, thick wire hung just below the headrest at the top of the plate.

At the same time, part of the wall opened, and there, in the dark space behind it, was a podium topped by a large red button.

It was all so familiar that she wanted to turn around and run.

"That's your cue," Wheatley whispered to her. "Go on, plug me in and press the button. So easy, anyone could do it. But you'll be the best at it."

Chell moved towards the Core Transfer Device. Wheatley followed.

He leaned against the silver plate, legs apart and hands pressed flat against the plate. He bowed his head. Chell leaned against him for balance and unzipped the very top of his jumpsuit. She plugged the thick wire from the Core Transfer Device into the large port near the back of his neck.

The second the wire connected with the port, the restraints snapped shut around Wheatley's wrists and ankles. He giggled nervously.

"Is this supposed to happen?" he asked. Chell kissed his cheek, took her crutches, and made her way to the button, moving fast, trying not to think too hard about what she was about to do.

She circled around it, stopped, and reached out a hand, then hesitated. She looked up towards the chassis.

He was facing her, watching her expectantly from the other side of the room. Even from this distance, she could see his hands tremble. His eyes were wide and unblinking.

"CORE TRANSFER ASSOCIATE, ARE YOU READY TO START?" the voice asked her and Chell mouthed _Yes_ and slammed her hand down on the button.

It happened slowly, as if in a dream, one of her dreams.

There was the sight of Wheatley sliding, feet-first, immobile, into the floor, and she could hear his familiar nervous and excited babbling, but this time around it had a touch of fear, of reluctance, of doubt, one that hadn't been there so many months ago.

He was laughing.

Then he was screaming.

And GLaDOS's head, unresisting, was torn off her body and thrown to the side like garbage. It narrowly missed their bag.

There was a ringing in her ears that started up, quiet at first, then getting louder and louder and louder until it blocked out everything else.

And then the white underbelly of the chassis unhinged, the body bowed like a headless snake into a pit in the ground, and then Wheatley was _there_, his jumpsuit unzipped down his back, all the wires of the chassis snaking out of his spine as he semi-reclined on the white underbelly as if it was a plastic throne, his legs dangling off its end. He was laughing, spinning the chassis in wide circles, throwing his arms up, rippling the walls of the chamber, letting cubes and confetti and dead turrets fly. It was all silent to her; his mirth was completely eclipsed by that ringing in her ears.

He looked at her, and the ringing turned into a roar. He was mouthing to her, gesturing, and there was a smile on his face.

And that smile was friendly and open and _loving._

She took hold of the crutches with shaking hands.

She moved forward.

She opened her mouth like a gasping fish and gasped for air.

His gesturing became more animated, his smile bigger, even though a crease appeared in between his brows.

She moved, slowly, to him, then dropped the crutches, stumbled, and fell into his lap. The crutches clattered to the floor.

"Chell! Oh, careful! Don't hurt yourself, now."

She could hear again, and she was aware of his hands on her.

He leaned down and gently picked her up. Chell, bewildered and dizzy, found herself sitting sideways on his lap, her right ear resting against his chest. They weren't far off the ground, but she still felt as if she was about to fall.

"Look, look, everything's gone swimmingly! Everything's going to be fine now. I'm in control. Look what I can do!"

There was a flash to her left, and she turned.

There were holograms, screens, curving in a half-circle on a flat plane in front of him: camera views of long-abandoned test chambers, algorithms and code flowing in rapid lines, lists of everything from different cake recipes to common human behaviors when faced with a pit of acid and thermal discouragement beams. Wheatley's hands moved to them, and they came alive.

"Oh wow, this is cool," he muttered, and rested his chin atop her head as he slid the holograms around, as if they comprised an enormous touch screen of their own.

Chell closed her eyes and leaned against his chest. He was as docile as always, as if he was sitting on a chair at home with her on his lap. At the feeling of her relaxing, he kissed the top of her head.

She moved a hand around to his back, but felt hundreds of wires that weren't his instead. She grimaced.

This was not the same.

She had to remember that.

Wheatley was saying something, but she didn't register it. She looked up at him with a confused tilt of her head.

Two things nudged her arms.

He, using metal claws from the ceiling, had retrieved her crutches. He held them steady for her as she took them. The chassis lowered further, and he helped her onto the floor.

"Let's go find you that cure," he said, and grinned at her. She nodded and turned away, biting her lip.

Another side of the chamber opened up, revealing a catwalk. As if hypnotized, she wandered to it, her crutches setting up a quick rhythm that competed with the double-time thump of her heart in her chest.

"Off you go! I'll be keeping an eye on you, I'll move things around to make it easier without a portal device. And…and…"

She stopped and turned around to face him.

Wheatley had been waving to her, but his hand now hung, drooping, in mid-air. His mouth was half-open, his original smile gone. His eyes were vacant, and he stared at a point in space just above her head, as if he had caught sight of a very large, very angry monster behind her.

He slowly lowered his hand.

There was something in his eyes.

It was very large, very looming, very empty.

Very _hungry_.

"You…you go along…" he murmured. "I'll…I'll do what you need…Chell…"

The way he said her name, how empty and lifeless he sounded, sent something boiling in the pit of her stomach, something black and long-dormant that made her feel sick and dizzy and very, very frightened.

And very, very determined.

"Go ahead," he said, sounding dreamy. "I'll be here if you need me."

She turned around, shook herself…

And moved onto the catwalk.


	5. Chapter 5

The facility was hushed without Her presence, but Wheatley's chatter more than made up for it.

"We're going to find you that cure, love," he said while she moved over the catwalk. The usual quiet hum of the facility was completely dulled to a whisper at the edge of Chell's consciousness. Somewhere, occasionally, a machine clicked or twittered before tapering off into the silence-that-wasn't, a soundspace completely dominated by the low-frequency hum of a facility at work and the accented voice of its new King. Among it all: the halting _tap-tap-tap _of her crutches and her own soft breathing.

She looked down at the bluish, smoky void below her. He had no screens like last time, no way for her to observe him observing her. She knew it was just him at the head of this place, him and his benign affection for her, but goosebumps still prickled on her skin every single time she passed a camera. She tried to avoid those somehow judgmental red eyes that still had Her cold, lingering influence on them.

And it may have been her imagination, but Wheatley sounded a little breathier than usual.

"I can just move you closer, now," Wheatley said, the smug smile evident in his voice. "Look at me, curing only my favorite human in the entire world. You're going to be good as new, Chell, just you _wait_. It'll be like all this never happened."

The catwalk below her gave a sudden lurch, and then the entire room tilted, all of it shifting at a gentle angle that slowly became more severe. Chell felt the rubber ends of her crutches giving, giving, giving, until finally they gave, and she went sliding towards an unfinished corner of the catwalk. She grabbed onto the guard rail's support beams. She body-blocked her crutches from slipping away.

Her heart raced. Wheatley, intentionally or not, was moving her towards the big blue nothingness below her. Even that smoky void was tilting, all of it climbing up and up until it very nearly formed the left wall of the room.

"Just hang on, love!" Wheatley said, "I just have to move this room over for you! Keep…holding…on!"

The strain in his voice was evident; this was a room so massive that she couldn't see its end, and the catwalk she was on wasn't even close to the ceiling. Surely this was taking up not a little of his processing power, even with the bulk of the chassis behind him.

Chell bit her lip as she remembered with a shock that Wheatley was only intelligent where housework and paper cranes and touching and loving were concerned. Thinking (and running this underground hell) was not what he was built for.

But he was doing this for her. In his mind, this all made sense, moving the room and telling her to hang on tight while he executed whatever plan he had.

He wasn't stupid. He couldn't be.

But she couldn't speak up and tell him to stop, and if she removed a hand to wave up at the cameras, she could lose her grip and plummet to her death. She didn't have the long-fall boots. Her hands were sweating.

The room swayed gently back and forth as Wheatley brought her closer to where she needed to be. The room was clearly not endless, but it only had a bottom to a being as gigantic as Wheatley currently was. Chell gritted her teeth and clenched her hands.

One crutch slipped, and she watched it tumble, end over end, before the blue abyss swallowed it.

She looked up at a camera; it was turned to her. So were all the other cameras in the room.

Chell gave the camera a small smile and a sharp nod.

"That's the spirit! I can fix this! All for you, love!"

One of her hands slipped. He gasped sharply, the speakers high up in the ceiling growing fuzzy for a split second.

"Oh, hang on, please! _Please _don't die!"

The room shuddered to a halt, swinging back and forth into right-side-up stillness again. Vertigo and nausea alike swelled in her, and the other sweaty palm slipped-

"Chell!"

The air rushed past her as she fell, her other crutch falling after her. Her mind was totally blank, and her stomach ceased to churn. She closed her eyes. An odd peace came over her, followed immediately by one question that made her heart beat faster:

What would he do without her?

And before she could answer herself she stopped falling, and the wind was briefly knocked out of her.

She opened her eyes.

One enormous metal claw held her around her waist; another snaked below her and supported her from the bottom so that she was lying flat, looking straight down into the void that had nearly killed her. She watched her last crutch fall and disappear.

The claws gingerly lifted her and placed her, stomach-down, on the floor of the catwalk she had just fallen off of. Chell exhaled a sigh of relief, completely in time with Wheatley's own sighing over the speakers.

"There you are, love, safe and sound. Oh!"

She watched the claws shoot straight down into the mist; after a few minutes, they reappeared with her crutches. They patiently waited on either side of her while she pushed herself up to her feet, using the handrails for support. Once she was standing again, the claws handed her her crutches, then shot off into the ceiling panels.

"Let's just…oh, God. Let's pretend that never happened. Never moving a room that massive again. Making a mental note to myself: 'Wheatley, do not do that again, unless you want your lady to die.'"

A _beep_ sounded. The voice from the core transfer came, loud and clear, over the speakers.

"NUCLEAR CORE REACTOR NOW ON AUTOMATIC. NO FURTHER MAINTENANCE NEEDED."

"That wasn't the 'note-to-self' feature! Come on, you little bugger, turn that back off! Where's the button?"

Chell waved a hand frantically at the camera.

"What? No? Leave as is? Bueno?"

She nodded, giving the camera a thumbs-up.

"Is 'automatic' a good thing?"

_Yes! _Chell mouthed.

"Oh, alright then." Wheatley's voice was meek. "If the lady says it's a good thing, it's a good thing. Automatic nuclear core reactor it is."

Chell breathed another sigh of relief.

There was another quiet gasp over the loudspeaker. Chell raised her head towards the ceiling, eyebrows furrowed. Her chest tightened.

"I'm fine, love, no worries. No worries at all." She could almost see his nervous smile in front of her. "Let's get going, shall we?"

She moved off the branch of the catwalk, turned onto the main stretch, and moved towards the opposite side of the room.

He had moved the room beside a white labyrinth of clean-white hallways, all paneled walls and dusty tile floors. Chell took her time moving through the confined halls and around blind turns. The cameras weren't here, but the panels meant Wheatley could still track her progress, and she could see the disguised speakers in the ceiling panels. He continued to chatter on to her.

There was no risk here. She checked every corner, but let her breathing slow and her pace become leisurely.

It was nice, being able to move through this familiar building without fear. Chell never thought she'd enjoy having Wheatley in charge, but his warm presence soothed her when everything about the facility normally made her hair stand on end. Without her portal gun and her long-fall boots, she was off-guard, in-danger, at-risk, but with him in charge, she was safe.

Still, that breathiness in his voice was worrying. The occasional gasps were worrying.

Chell paused before another blind turn.

If she listened closely, he had that apologetic tone in his voice when he spoke to her, the same one he got when he wanted to ask her to do something but didn't want to bother her. She had been his world for months, and he had slowly become hers, but she was aware, day in and day out, that she was always the one in power. Even when Wheatley was in the chassis, he was still yielding to her and willing to save her life if she was in danger. She was precious to him because she was everything for him.

Where was The Itch now? Why hadn't he eaten her alive yet?

She bit her lip and peeked around the corner.

He didn't want to hurt her.

A quiet, feminine voice rose over Wheatley's.

"There you are."


	6. Chapter 6

"Oh, God, no!" Wheatley shouted. "_That's not supposed to be there!"_

Chell ducked out of sight just as gunfire broke out. She pressed herself against the wall, watching in horror as bullet holes littered the panels opposite the turret. Wheatley gave a quiet cry of pain.

She stood still for a while, trying to catch her breath, listening intently to the turret chattering away.

"Hello? Are you still there?" The turret's gears clicked as it shifted back and forth on its axis. She watched its laser beam dance on the wall among the bullet holes. "Will you come over here?"

Wheatley spoke up, his voice slow and careful. "Chell, I have to get you out of there."

Chell spread her hands and looked up at the ceiling.

The panels next to her twitched as he continued. "That wasn't…I didn't put that turret gun there. That wasn't me. I'm going to get you out of there."

Chell sighed and lowered her arms. On a whim, she reached back and rubbed the panel behind herself, as if she was doing something as normal as stroking his cheek. Over the speakers, she heard Wheatley give a heavy groan.

He sounded oddly…satisfied.

A shiver went through her. She bit her lip and turned her eyes towards the ceiling, waiting for him to say something; he was uncharacteristically silent.

Finally, he spoke.

"I leave it in your capable hands." His voice was low, heavy, right in the register of voice he saved for lonely nights, and she shivered again. "You can do it, love. Knock him out."

_Knock him out._

Chell risked another glance at the turret, which had long since settled in its hallway. It spotted her, and its hull swelled, but Chell dove behind the corner before it could shoot at her.

She turned so that she was leaning heavily on her side against the wall. She hopped closer to the corner, taking care to not use her damaged leg, until she was barely out of sight of the turret's beam.

She sneaked another glance at the turret to take aim, then ducked out of sight and lifted up her crutch. She spun it in both hands, still leaning against the panels and on her good leg for support, until the crutch's rubber end pointed towards the turret.

If this didn't work, she thought, she would only have one crutch left: one piece of ammunition. And if _that_ crutch didn't work, she would have to jump directly into the path of the turret gun and knock it down; that would turn her into Swiss cheese, she was sure. One turret could be deadly.

Wheatley was quiet. almost silent save for his breathing. The panels near her flexed before going still.

He was watching her. And waiting.

She took a deep breath, then let it out.

She slowly slid down the wall, one hand propped against it for balance, and bent over to place the crutch on the floor.

The turret made a few beeps. "There you are."

Chell gave the crutch a mighty push.

It slid, and slid, and slid, and then finally connected with one of the back legs of the turret.

It worked: the crutch had just enough speed to send the turret tumbling to the tile floor. The turret shrieked, and Chell moved out of the way as it unleashed a frantic stream of bullets in all directions. Her heart was racing; Wheatley grunted a few times as stray bullets hit the panels.

"Shutting down," murmured the turret. It fell silent.

Chell peeked around the corner, then, seeing the dead turret, rounded it, still heavily supporting herself on the wall.

"That was brilliant!" Wheatley crowed over the speakers. "All this time we've been living together and I've never see-_ohhh…"_

He gave a long moan.

Chell froze halfway towards retrieving her crutch from under the turret.

This was exactly what she had been afraid of.

"Ohh, Chell…God. Man alive, was that something!"

She retrieved her crutch and stood. She moved away from the panels and into the center of the hall. The panels on both sides flexed towards her as she moved.

"What's wrong? You took down that turret gun, you got your crutches, you made me feel _amazing _while you did it…you're stunning. But, but, you look ashamed, what did I…?"

He trailed off.

"Oh."

Chell nodded at the floor while she moved through the labyrinthine halls.

"You're…this is what you were talking about, wasn't it?" Wheatley sounded sheepish. "The, uh…Itch? Is that what you called it? The…that's the…thing that…you had nightmares about. That I'm feeling right now."

Chell stopped in the hall and hunched her shoulders, her lips drawn into a tight line.

"Oh, love, come here."

A panel removed itself from the wall and stretched itself towards her. Chell turned to it and eyed it warily.

The panel waved at her. "It's alright!" said Wheatley. "Not going to hurt you. No turret guns in this panel, rest assured. Or behind it. Or..." The panel drooped. "...anywhere _near_ it."

Chell made her halting way towards it.

Its extended, robotic arm drew around her and embraced her, the panel itself gently tapping her back. Chell found herself leaning into it.

"Wheatley didn't mean it," Wheatley said quietly over the speakers. "I didn't…that wasn't a _test_, I don't know why I…I felt so tremendous. I'm sorry. I should have asked you if you wanted to test."

Chell rubbed her eyes, taking deep breaths.

Her leg was numb; she could stand on it without pain if she needed to, even though she knew she'd exacerbate her injury that way. Her heart was in her throat. Wheatley was still feeling something of the Itch, which was only to be expected since she had been stupid enough to put him in the chassis, to make the same mistake twice, to sink herself right back into this same hell because she loved him.

And if he was feeling the Itch and if her leg was going completely numb, that meant she had less time than she had originally thought.

"And if you…you didn't want to test, then what's the use of me testing you?" Wheatley was babbling. "I mean, that's rubbish, that, not getting to see you happy about testing, or anything I'm up to. Like the…Naked Time, really."

Chell huffed out a laugh.

"I'm serious!" Wheatley squeaked. "Next time, I'll ask you if you want to do any science. Alright? We practice safe science here in Wheatley Laboratories. All safe, all the time."

The panel stiffened. "Oh! Chell! Just had a brainwave."

The panel shuddered and drew back into the wall. "Keep moving through these halls, and I'll show you once you get to the other side."

And Chell began to move forward, despite her better judgment.

The labyrinth seemed to stretch on for forever. Wheatley had led her into it; surely every step led her closer to the cure for her leg. But the farther she wandered, the more dead-ends she encountered, the more blind corners she had to check, the less sure she became.

It was funny, she thought as she listened to her crutches' tapping, how her trust in Wheatley, built so carefully over a long fall and a longer winter, was now crumbling in her fingers. Wheatley still felt the Itch. She remembered how she had considered him an X-factor, an unpredictable little time bomb in her own quiet home, and how some part of her still cried out in fear when he touched her.

She knew he loved her like she loved him.

She also knew that he kept an eye on his own interests at all times.

She wondered if he was even bringing her closer to a cure, or just drawing her deeper into the facility and rearranging it so that she wouldn't be able to leave. Before the turret, before even moving the room, this hadn't been a worry on her mind, and that change of heart, that switch back into that familiar, hair-trigger survival mode, scared her to no end.

Chell sighed again and rounded a corner, only to come face-to-face with a grey-paneled hallway that let out into a bigger room.

She moved towards it slowly. Once she got to the end, she stuck a head out and looked around.

"Ta-da!"

She swiveled her head to the right.

Wheatley had brought back his gigantic screens from before, the ones he had used to _watch _her test, and was now leaning excitedly towards his end of the screen. A gigantic smile was on his face.

"You see? Clever idea, isn't it? Now you can see me!"

When her wide-eyed expression didn't go away, he slumped in the chassis chair. "Oh, love, don't be that way. Isn't it like how scientists put pictures of their families on their desks?" He perked up again, his smile now hopeful. "I thought it might help if you could see me. So you know that I'm not up to some suspicious misconduct over here."

His voice became quiet. "And maybe this will make you feel better because you get to look at me, too. And we can see each other."

She turned her entire body towards the screen. Wheatley blushed a little, his smile widening and growing even more hopeful.

He reached out and pressed his fingers against the screen. He bit his lip and stared at her. The smile disappeared, and he raised his eyebrows at her.

She kept still.

Then Chell crept towards Wheatley's screen and looked up at him while she placed a hand flat against it, right where Wheatley's fingers were touching.

He let out a nervous laugh and ran his free hand through his blonde hair. "That's my girl."

He gently ran the back of his index finger against the screen. She gave him a half-smile and mimicked the same movement with her hand. They smiled at each other.

Maybe he could stave off the Itch for her.

She turned towards the room he had led her to, but as she was moving away, she heard him mutter:

"Come off it, mate. Leave her alone."

She stopped.

"I'm fine!" he said, a little too cheerily. "Everything's fine here! No worries! Just keep on doing what you're doing."

Somewhere beyond the panel's walls, there was a low-frequency rumble that made her teeth chatter in her mouth. "I'm moving some more rooms towards you. We'll get to that cure in no time at all."

Chell wiped the sweat off her brow with one hand and kept moving.


	7. Chapter 7

**Hey, guys! Some people seem to be a little confused as to what's going on in this fic. It's a sequel to another Chelley fic I wrote named "Innocent", so if you haven't read that one, you're probably a little lost! I recommend you read that before reading this one so that you can enjoy this one more. Thanks!**

* * *

Wheatley's behavior became more suspicious. A constant, festering paranoia settled in Chell's stomach and made continuing difficult.

His breathing became more heavy; it was deafening in the confined hallways he moved her through, as if he had become the facility itself, as if the facility was one gigantic mechanical organism with Wheatley as its brain. She could see the panels tremble sometimes, as if afraid of her.

As if anticipating something from her.

Wheatley's talk became more and more infrequent until it stopped altogether. Whenever she looked up at one of the screens, he would smile at her and begin talking again.

But the smile itself stretched, grew thin, until she knew it was forced. She knew he was trying to make her happy, reassure her that nothing was wrong and generally act like his usual optimistic self. When she left a room, he'd fall silent again until she looked at another screen, and the smile would reappear along with the talking.

The heavy breathing was constant.

He still let her rest. He didn't ask anything of her. He kept moving rooms for her, letting her leap and bound across the facility in search of the something that would heal her leg, possibly heal the bone, too, let her survive and escape with him. He still cared.

But Wheatley wanted badly to test her, she knew.

In one of the many labyrinths he put her through, she found a heap of junk in front of her: turret hulls, wires, cameras with their lenses smashed, old panels, and a disturbing amount of dead crows, lying at odd angles with their necks broken in two.

Chell recoiled and held her breath against the smell.

"I don't know if I can move this room for you, love," Wheatley sighed. She heard him shifting in the chassis. "C-can't do it even if I wanted to, which I do. Can you…can you get over it? Please? I know it's a lot, but can you try? For me?"

Chell nudged the pile of junk with a crutch, her lip curling.

"Chell, I…come _on_." He had a whining tone in his voice. "You kill the rabbits all the time. This isn't too different, now, is it? Can't you get over this? You're so brave. Are you going to stop because of a bunch of bloody birds, love?"

She bit her lip. Was Wheatley purposely trying to anger her? He had never done this before, not even when they fought.

Was this a test for her?

"You're better than that, I know. Come on, Chell. Do it. Get over it."

She gritted her teeth and moved forward towards the pile. Wheatley's breath hitched.

Chell began clearing out the pile as best she could with her crutches. The turrets and birds were easy enough to move, as were the cameras and wires, but the panels proved much more difficult; the best she could do was poke at the objects underneath the panels until they shifted and the concrete slabs fell into place nearer to the floor.

After a few minutes of trying (unsuccessfully), to level the pile, she gave up, threw her crutches across, lied against the pile, and pulled herself through against the discarded panels she had moved. She kept her broken leg raised as best she could. She felt the pile shift under her; she grit her teeth and forced herself to continue. Wheatley was dead silent, and every panel on the walls flexed slightly outwards as she moved.

She finally made her way to the other side.

Chell kept herself pressed against the floor.

Wheatley gave a short little gasp before falling silent again.

Then the panels on the wall slammed shut, one by one by one, down the long hall. It sounded as if Wheatley were closing door after door after door.

In a rippling wave, the walls smoothed over.

She took her crutches and, trembling, pulled herself up. As soon as she caught her balance, she shook herself and moved as fast as she could away from the pile.

"Well done, love," Wheatley murmured as she kept on moving.

She heard him mutter under his breath: "Not as good as the last time. _Why_?"

* * *

Chell was resting in a different labyrinth when she heard something.

The speakers in these halls had shorted out after he had tried to help her around some broken panels. She hadn't heard his voice in ages, let alone his constant, heavy breathing. She had taken the time to sit down and rest, close her eyes, think: his gasps no longer sounded like gasps of pleasure, but of pain. She wasn't sure. Her leg was completely numb. She was hungry; he wasn't feeding her much.

When she heard his voice faintly babbling away from the next room, she refocused, picked herself up off the floor, and went to investigate.

"…and I don't want to, that's the thing, mate, because _she_ doesn't want to. Do you understand me? Is this making any sense at all?"

The labyrinth let out into an open, airy room, one with a solid wall, one full of panels and with a ceiling high enough to rival the chassis chamber. Wheatley's monitor was on a wall to the left of the entrance to the labyrinth. She pressed herself against the opposite labyrinth wall, deep enough so that she could lean to her right just slightly and watch him without being seen.

Wheatley was sitting bolt upright in the chassis, nervously toying with something in his hands while he talked.

"She doesn't want to be here, she just…she did something stupid but she doesn't deserve the testing, mate. I don't want that for her. She's too good."

He winced. "I know, but I…I don't want to _scare _her! What kind of monster does that? Make his lady do the very thing she's afraid of? Not me. Not Wheatley." His hands stilled on the object, and his brows furrowed. "I'm not a monster."

He continued to fiddle. She bit her lip. Those hand movements looked terribly familiar.

"No one deserves the testing. It's too much like _Her_. I did that once and I'm not going to do it again, so you can…"

He paused.

He closed his eyes and shouted, "You can stuff it, alright? She's my lady and whatever she says goes!"

Without warning, he tilted his head back and let out a loud cry. He dropped the thing he was holding into his lap.

A paper crane.

Her eyes widened. She could see the remnants of her writing on there. He had taken one of her communication papers and was making a crane; whether it was out of stress or affection or as an apology, she didn't know. He had _never _used a paper she had written on for one of his cranes.

On one of the wings, in her tiny, cramped, rickety handwriting: _You're going to do fine._

On the tail: _I know you. And you wouldn't._

Wheatley bowed forward, eyes shut tight in pain and mouth gaping open. She gasped.

The chassis connection wire had swelled in the back of his neck. Lines of blue light spread from his shoulders, up his neck, and up the wire, pulsing like the blue lines in his chest. Mixed in were red lines that pulsed in time with the blue, the light seeming to go into his neck instead of out. When she looked harder, she saw red lines spreading across his skin, too.

It was as if the chassis itself were feeding on him and putting _something_ back in.

She slowly made her way out on her crutches, her eyes glued to the screen.

At the sound of her approach, Wheatley's head snapped up. He leaned so far forward that the crane tumbled from his lap. "Chell!" he said, a little too eagerly and with too wide a smile. "I have a surprise for you."

The room shook and resettled itself. The panels rippled. His eyes shifted towards a door in the other end of the room.

"I want you to go over to that door, there, and open it. The surprise is in there."

When she didn't move immediately:

"Come on."

He tilted his head.

"Would I lie to you, love?"


	8. Chapter 8

****She made her way to the door, balanced herself on her crutches, and reached for the handle.

What was beyond the door didn't seem real.

The room was white, blinding white, _a familiar white_, the fluorescent lights turned up so high she had to squint for a minute.

There was something red and circular on the floor, and a tube jutting out from the ceiling, and laser beams cutting across the floor, and a few square objects, some with lenses that reflected her shocked face. Wheatley's screen was to the right of her, taking up a thin strip of wall from floor to ceiling.

A test chamber.

He had led her into a test chamber.

The door closed with a quiet, final-sounding _click_.

She began to tremble, her eyes glued to the button on the floor. Its clean lines swam before her eyes, the whole chunk of plastic blurring together in one angry blur of red and white until her vision cleared and a few warm tears rolled down her face. Her body shook, her eyes darted from left to right, taking in the Thermal Discouragement Beams, the Cube Transportation Pipe, those terrible bluish lenses on the Thermal Discouragement Beam Redirection Cubes, all their technical names burned into her memory because how _could_ she forget them, how could she forget that this was the same robot in control of her, and through it all came that terrible ringing in her ears, a ringing that made it near impossible to hear the gentle, softly-accented voice drifting through the room, too close to her, too far away.

"I'm sorry, love."

She slowly turned to look at him, her trembling increasing. He was looking up at her with a touch of shame. His hands were folded in his lap, and he trembled a little himself.

"This was the only room I could find," he said quietly, "and I couldn't-"

She hefted her crutch up and swung at the screen. The ringing in her ears stopped as the crutch whistled through the air, guided by her hand.

Its end connected with the glass with a loud _crack._ Wheatley visibly flinched away from the screen, hands flying up to cover his face even though she was too far away for her to do anything, and that innocence he pretended to have just made her angrier, made her swing her other crutch at the screen as hard as she could, and this time a few flakes of glass fell out onto the floor, shaking and reflecting tiny bits of ugly fluorescent light all over before stilling.

This was the same robot. She should have known.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" he squeaked, peeking up at her from over his hands. "I'm sorry! Please!"

She swung her crutch at him one more time, a tired last little swing that missed, before falling heavily against them and hunching over.

She took a strangled gasp and cried.

"Listen! Look! Oh, Chell, please." He leaned forward and looked down at her, his eyes wide and watery. He bit his lip. "L-look! Chell! Hey! Look over there! Look! It's your surprise!"

A claw reached down from the ceiling and tapped her shoulder. She looked up at him, sniffling; the second he made eye contact with her, he pointed towards the center of the room, where a cube was waiting. Another robotic claw came down from the ceiling panel above it and gently placed something on the cube.

"Look!" he said, exasperated but with a faint air of hope, "This test chamber wasn't the surprise, love! _That's _your surprise! There!"

She pushed the metal claw off her shoulder, and it retracted into the ceiling. Wheatley kept his eyes on her as she walked across the room to the cube.

The crane, the exact crane he had just made in the chassis, was sitting on the cube in front of her. It was slightly crumpled from his nervous hands.

Chell bit her lip, more tears escaping her. She picked up the crane and turned it over in her fingers.

_I know you._

"Do you like it?" Wheatley asked quietly. "I made that for you. I was thinking of you."

She didn't respond, still looking at the paper crane.

_And you wouldn't._

He was quiet, too.

Then: "While we're here, can you just…try this eensy weensy-"

The effect was immediate: she crumpled the paper crane, all his hard work, all those reassuring words that told him that everything would be fine, that she could tell he'd take care of her like he had already been taking care of her, all that trust, and threw it on the ground.

It lied there, an off-white, broken little thing, dwarfed by the shiny-white of the facility and one of its ugly test chambers.

Wheatley made a shocked, strangled little cry.

She lifted her crutches and headed towards the other end of the test chamber, where the locked door was.

She was going to wait.

_Click, click, click…_

She was going to make him agree not to test her.

_Click, click, click..._

Then, without warning, a chunk of wall came smashing through the ceiling, landing with a decidedly heavy _thud _in front of her and shattering the white tile just underneath. It stood, a vertical slab of white concrete, blocking her path.

She jumped.

"Now listen here, Chell," Wheatley said, his voice even though decidedly breathier, "I am doing this all for you."

She swallowed hard and forced herself not to turn around.

"And…and the most you can do…" He hiccupped. "I'm so sorry, love, I….but the most you can do is finish. This. Test. You have to. For me?"

She looked down at the floor.

"Chell!" he screamed suddenly, making her look straight ahead at the wall again. "You ran away from me! _You_ did this! Making us come back here when you said we wouldn't!"

She shook her head slowly, the tears threatening to fall again.

"And…and don't think I didn't notice where you went, _Lady_," he continued, his voice growing quieter and quieter. "You…you went to a place with _food_. You were stocking up t-to _leave _me_. _Alone. Even though we have _plenty_ of food in the house that's probably all rotted by now because of your _inability -"_

He slammed the wall down against the floor. She gasped and shrunk back.

"-to c-c-c-c_compromise-"_

He lifted another section of the wall at the other side of the chamber. Chell caught sight of dark catwalks behind it. Wheatley sounded as if he was about to cry.

"-f-for _once-"_

She flipped over and pressed herself against the wall in front of her.

"-in your _sorry-_"

She reached down, took a cube, and flung it with all her might at the yawning void beyond.

"-m-m-m-_miserable_-"

The cube slid, and slid, and slid.

"-_human _liiii OH GOD, THE WALL IS JAMMED! The wall is jammed!"

The wall that has opened slammed repeatedly against the cube, but couldn't push it away or close the opening. Without thinking, Chell dropped down, flung her crutches through onto the dark catwalks lied flat on her stomach, and pulled herself through as fast as she could. She realized that this could damage her leg more, but the promise of freedom from the test chamber was all too appealing.

"Chell!" Wheatley howled, and seconds after she straightened up and stood on the catwalks, the cube slipped, and the wall to the test chamber slammed shut. The boom bounced off the walls, making the ancient catwalks tremble. The fluorescent light cut out. All that was left now were the lights from one or two lonely bulbs, hanging from the ceiling of the filthy room.

There were no panels, cameras, or screens here. Chell breathed out slowly.

"Chell!" Wheatley howled again, his voice sounding distant. It echoed off the walls; Chell realized that he was still speaking to her through the test chamber speakers. "Chell, I…Chell, _please…_"

He let out a loud, strangled sob, his vocal processors straining.

"Please come back. We can work this out, love!"

Chell listened as he panted heavily for a minute.

Then he screamed, "You aren't even going the right _way!"_

And trailed off into loud crying.

Chell winced and blinked away a few stray tears, but forced herself to move forward.

There was another door, a rusted metal one, that needed opening.

"Chell?" Wheatley whispered, his voice high-pitched and weak as she placed her hand on the door's handle. "Chell? Love? Lady?"

She turned it and walked through the dimly-lit hall behind the door.

There were three cameras here, and they all whipped around to face her.

And there, off to the side, was a red light, breaking through the darkness, blinking on and off in a stuttering rhythm.

"Hello? Hello?"


	9. Chapter 9

**The Different Turret's lines are taken entirely from Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves."**

* * *

"Hello," said the turret in a quiet voice. "Hello?"

Its light blinked on and off. It was stationed against the wall, its beam fixed on the corner near the door Chell just came through. The dusty speakersabove coughed static, then out came Wheatley's voice.

"Don't look at that!" he screamed, but Chell help up a hand towards a camera, and he stuttered and trailed off into silence.

She crept closer. The turret didn't move.

"Hello, Holloway," it said suddenly. Chell jumped. "The dreamer in her corner wrote off the world in a detailed daydream that destroyed, one by one, all the objects in the world."

"Chell," Wheatley growled. Chell looked up and shook her head.

Something inside the turret clicked and whirred. "Don't go in there again, Navy," it said. The red laser beam continued to stutter, pointed at nothing. "Not such a hot idea."

Chell reached out, rad the pad of her index finger against the turret's smooth white hull. This was a broken turret, she remembered now; it was an abandoned machine like the one she had saved from Redemption so many months ago.

How many of these broken turrets _were_ there?

Wheatley sniffled. Chell forced herself to stay focused.

"Navidson is not Minos," said the turret, "he did not build the labyrinth. In time, the gates will open. In time, his heart will open. Then the shadows will bleed and the locks will break."

"Chell, I don't like this," Wheatley whined. She could hear wires clacking together as he shifted in the chassis. His voice tapered off into soft panting, followed by another groan of pain. Chell shivered.

The turret slid its laser beam a fraction of an inch towards her. "Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting." The beam slid back into place. "This great blue world of yours seems a house of leaves, moments before the wind."

A weight sank in her stomach. Chell slowly moved away from the turret.

Then she turned away and moved as fast as she could towards the opposite end of the hall.

"Chell!" Wheatley screamed.

"The Minotaur waits," said the turret calmly, "at the center of the labyrinth."

She slammed into the door at the end of the hall. In the light of a single bulb, she tugged, and the heavy metal flung open with a rusty squeal.

"Chell, no!"

She threw herself into the hall beyond and slammed the door.

The sound echoed. This new corridor glowed with a faint blue light. The walls were painted black. This place was without cameras and completely featureless save for the door she had just come through…

…and a glass door at the end of the hall.

"Chell," Wheatley sighed from a single speaker, "Love. Can't we talk about this?"

His voice was whisper-close in the tiny hall.

Chell crept towards the door at the other end.

"Like we always do? We can compromise! Just like old times. You do something for me, I do something for you."

LABORATORY 005, read the glass door.

"Just one test? One measly test?"

She paused.

"For me?"

She opened the door.

"This isn't the same as the first time."

She winced and closed the door behind her.

She had stumbled across an old medical ward. Labeled glass cabinets lined the walls, and stools were scattered around the room, mostly gathered around one long, black counter. A full human skeleton grinned at her from its stand in the corner. Medical diagrams, all with the Aperture logo at the bottom, covered the walls. This laboratory, too, glowed with a faint blue light.

She scanned the ceiling. No speakers or cameras to be seen, and she couldn't hear Wheatley's voice at all. He couldn't get her here.

She looked forward. On the counter in front of her were three sets of large flasks: one set held clear liquid, one set held black liquid, and one set held a green liquid that glowed with a strange bioluminescence; each set had flasks that were partially empty, completely drained, or completely full.

Each set had a unique label on each of its bottles.

Chell moved forward and picked up a full clear flask:

EMERGENCY RESPONSE

FOR ALLERGIC REACTIONS

PLEASE DO NOT DRINK ENTIRE BOTTLE

USE ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

CHILDREN UNDER THREE: 1 mL

ADULTS AND CHILDREN OVER THREE: 2 mL

**PROTOTYPE: DO NOT BRING OUTSIDE OF THIS LABORATORY**

She set that down and picked up a full black flask:

APERTURE SCIENCE'S "DARKNESS IN A BOTTLE"TM

USE ENTIRE BOTTLE ONLY

USING LESS THAN ENTIRE BOTTLE COULD RESULT IN FIRE, BODILY MUTATIONS, OR SEVERE ACNE

USE WITH CAUTION

**PROTOTYPE: DO NOT BRING OUTSIDE OF THIS LABORATORY**

She set that down and picked up a full flask of the green liquid:

APERTURE SCIENCE'S "MAGIC MOLD"TM INFECTION ANTIDOTE

USE WITH CAUTION

FLAMMABLE

CHILDREN UNDER THREE: HALF BOTTLE (125 mL)

ADULTS AND CHILDREN OVER THREE: ENTIRE BOTTLE (250 mL)

**PROTOTYPE: DO NOT BRING OUTSIDE OF THIS LABORATORY**

Her eyes widened. This green liquid glowing so soothingly in her hand was the cure.

Wheatley had been moving her closer after all.

Then why did he say that she was moving the wrong way when she was only coming closer?

A sticky note sat next to the green flasks:

_Safe to use. Robert was fine. 250 mL is right dosage. Get on market ASAP._

This was Aperture technology she was dealing with, but Wheatley had led her here, he had told her about this place, and she had no other options.

Without any further hesitation, she uncorked the flask and drank.

Chell made fast work of the 250 milliliters. She made sure to empty the flask, even shaking it to remove as many drops as she could. After she was sure she had drunk as much as possible, she set the flask back on the counter and waited.

A few minutes passed.

Then an odd burning sensation began to spread through her leg from the center of her injured calf. At first, it started out as a tingle, a buzz so foreign to her after not having feeling in that leg for so long.

Then it grew, and grew, and grew.

Chell gripped her injured leg with one hand and let out a silent cry as the pain increased. A crutch fell and connected with the tile floor with a loud _bang_. Her entire leg was on fire. Her eyes watered, and she gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. Her breath came in sharp little gasps. The pain flitted to her chest and burned there, too.

And just like that, the pain quickly faded and disappeared.

She opened her eyes and looked down at her leg. She leaned heavily against the counter and gingerly removed part of the splint, peeking inside.

Aside from some residue left on the splint, her leg was completely smooth and clear, as if nothing had happened.

She exhaled slowly and replaced the splint. She raised herself back up onto her crutches and pocketed another full flask of the cure before turning and heading towards the door.

Then she got an idea.

She turned and looked around the glass cabinets. Surely there was something here that could help her, among these prototypes and miracle cures. Surely Aperture would have thought this through, if their "magic mold" liked to spread to limbs.

Chell spotted what she wanted and acted fast.

She dug around in a cabinet and took out all the necessary supplies, reviewing the instructions, thinking carefully.

Then she removed her splint, constructed what she needed, and made sure everything was in place before standing up.

She carefully leaned her crutches against the countertop with the vials. She grinned.

Then she walked to the door, splint-less but with something new on her leg.

She didn't want to re-infect herself, after all.

APERTURE SCIENCE "INSTACAST"TM

FAST-SETTING "INSTAPLASTER" TECHNOLOGY

FOR USE SETTING BROKEN LIMBS AND DIGITS

GOES FROM LIQUID TO SOLID IN FIVE MINUTES

USE WITH CAUTION

WATER-RESISTANT

CAN RESIST UP TO 400 LBS OF PRESSURE

WILL SHED AND DISSOLVE TEN WEEKS AFTER SETTING


	10. Chapter 10

As Chell moved towards the laboratory door, a thought nagged at the back of her mind.

She paused just short of the glass. This close to the hallway, she could very faintly hear Wheatley babbling to her. The glass muffled his words.

This was a part of the facility she had never seen before. Now, granted, there was an obscene amount of the facility she had never seen before, but labs were something _different_. The testing chambers were usually next to offices, not laboratories or anything even resembling a place where science was done. Probing her own memory offered feeble, fuzzy memories of decrepit rooms like the one Wheatley's test chamber had led into. More than once she had come across dim halls like the two just outside of this laboratory. But a laboratory proper? Absolutely not.

That was it, that was the thing that was giving her pause: Aperture Laboratories, despite its name, seemed to have very few _laboratories_, no benches or fume hoods or safety signs peppering chemically-stained walls. Unless you counted its test chambers as laboratories, this facility kept its rooms of science out-of-reach and buried behind hundreds, possibly thousands, of drab office rooms.

Surely this place could offer more than just a cure for her leg. It could offer a real advantage against him.

Honestly, all she wanted was to leave.

Maybe with him.

Maybe not.

Either way, this whole excursion has been a bad idea.

Chell turned and examined the laboratory again. There were two other doors, painted black, within the room. The first, against the left-hand wall and partially obscured by cabinets, was securely locked and wouldn't give.

The second door, on the right-hand wall, swung open easily when she tried it. The hall beyond it was dark save for some sparse red lights. It was silent: no hum of machinery, no buzz of electricity, nothing.

The scientists in this part of the facility must have forgotten to invest in proper lights. Either that or GLaDOS had never seen fit to light such a distant, unused part of the facility, and Wheatley hadn't, either, assuming he even knew where she was.

But this hall was better than returning to the test chamber from earlier, and so she moved forward and let the door swing shut and lock behind her.

Now that there were no outside sources of light, she could see that the eerie red light was coming from the wall; its glow only reached so far into the blackness. The smell of dust was strong in the air, along with a faint, cloying sent that Chell, stomach turning, recognized as the smell of human corpses. The hallway was completely clear, from what she could see, but still the stench of death persisted. She moved, wincing as she stepped on her casted leg, towards the source of the red light.

The source, she now saw, was a control panel in the left-hand wall.

Her eyes swept over the dusty metal, over the red lights and the lights that weren't even turned on, over dials and meters and levers and buttons, some of them labeled in languages she couldn't recognize, some labeled over and over in every language imaginable. Her hands, fingers twitching, hovered over the panel.

There was one blue light, among the red. It pulsed gently.

Like the glow in Wheatley's bare chest.

Just below the unlabeled light was one small button, set deep into the metal of the control panel wall. Chell leaned forward and peered at its tiny label.

In bright-orange capitals, it said: "SLEEP."

Chell staggered backwards. She _knew_ this wall. Its exact parallel, albeit simplified and turned into the language of dozens of black wires (wires she herself had touched and explored, whose labels she had read time and again in thousands of quiet moments), was in Wheatley's back. This control panel, essentially, _was_ his back, now that he was in the chassis.

So, then, this is what the scientists had used to manipulate GLaDOS. This exhaustive control panel had failed them. And now, standing amongst the lingering smell of their corpses, she had a chance to do what they had never been able to do: keep their facility, and its controller, from murdering her.

She hesitated.

_Knock him out._

Oh, how easy that would be; she could simply take him and run. They could escape across the yellow, endless fields, back to their house, back to where they belonged, away from Here; she could throw his sleeping self onto the couch and collapse onto her bed upstairs and cry and not come out to wake him until her leg was completely healed.

And then what?

Her hand, its finger outstretched towards the SLEEP button, suddenly curled up and shook like a wounded animal. She thought, with a hollow pit in her stomach, that she'd rather escape without him than carry his lifeless body in her arms. She didn't want to wake him up again. She didn't want to hear his CPU boot up as he came to. She didn't want to re-bear those tense few seconds where she wondered whether he remembered her or not. And she didn't want to re-teach him gentility or what forgiveness was.

There was a lot she could do, but dialing back to square one was one thing she _couldn't _do more than once.

A hissing sound came from above her head. Chell looked up slowly, as if in a dream.

A mechanical claw shot down from the ceiling and grabbed her by the waist.

Chell gasped and struggled as the claw hefted her up. Clanking and hissing, it dragged her, as if she were a ragdoll, towards the other end of the hallway. As she fought against it, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the end wall opening up into a cavernous room. Its white light temporarily blinded her before her vision cleared and she could get a good look at her surroundings.

Wheatley had no screens here.

She felt the emptiness of the abyss below her, and turned her gaze to the ceiling, willing herself not to look down.

Wheatley's voice was coming through speakers. He was screaming.

"You let her go, mate! Wh-what are you doing to her? Where are you taking…?"

Suddenly, he grew quiet, and a change of inflection colored his voice a sinister sort of pleased with himself. Chell stopped pushing down on the sides of the claw. She desperately tried to take in more air. The claw had a death grip that was making her dizzy, but she didn't want to fall to her death. Not here.

Not with him watching.

"Oh, I see. Heh. You're bringing her to _me_, aren't you? You're…you're all very clever, doing this for me. I can deal with her."

Then a dark threat crept into Wheatley's tone, one that made shivers go up her spine even if her heart leapt at his words.

"B-but if you hurt her, I swear…you will be very, very dead. All of you. Dead. But especially _you,_ mate. Especially you. Nobody will hurt her. You hear me?"

His voice dropped to a whisper. "Nobody."

The claw moved forward into another secluded hallway, and its grip tightened. She strained upwards, her hands pushing down on the claw; in response, she heard a hydraulic hiss from the ceiling to which it was attached. The white panels in the hall rippled, and the claw squeezed even tighter.

Black spots filled her vision. Her head felt light. The claw swerved around corner after corner, jerking her violently back and forth.

Just as she thought she was about to pass out, the claw tossed her roughly onto a hard tile surface, knocking the wind out of her. Chell gritted her teeth and struggled to push herself up. She was trembling.

"_There _you are, lady."

She slowly looked up, still gulping for air.

The claw had deposited her right in Wheatley's chamber.

The entire chassis turned to face her. Wheatley leaned back into the seat of its body, the wires behind him loosening. Chell could see that they were glowing faintly now, all of them, lit with that strange mixture of pulsing red and blue light. Wheatley's slightly upturned chin masked the swollen main wire she knew was feeding into the back of his head.

"I want to make a little deal with you," Wheatley said, steepling his fingers and smiling at her. "Something that won't hurt either of us. Sound alright?"

Chell's eyes narrowed as she struggled, panting, to her feet. Her head spun as she stood.

"This facility wants to _kill_ you, love. It hates you. For whatever reason, it wants to see you dead."

He leaned forward towards her, and the chassis moved with him.

"But I don't want to see you dead. Obviously. I just want to see you _better_."

She saw his eyes slide to the cast. "And I see you've gotten that taken care of, so here's Part Two of what I want from you."

He turned from her, looking up. Chell followed his gaze upwards; the hole in the ceiling was almost gone. It was being rebuilt, much like the elevator had repaired itself. As she looked back to Wheatley, she noticed that the burn marks normally present on his skin were fading, too.

"This place is so much _safer_. You know I have control over everything. I just tell the facility not to kill you, and _bam_, we're fine down here. No mold, no need for food. Just you and me, safe and sound. Forever."

He turned back to her, the smile gone. Despite him glaring at her, and despite her instinctual, familiar fear of him, Chell thought she saw his mouth twitch, for a split-second, into a grimace.

"But unless you test for me, unless you're willing to get rid of this _awful_ pain, get rid of t-this _Itch_ in exchange for safety, a nice home, you're not getting _anything_. I'm trying to look out for you, love. Really. But I'll…"

And this time the grimace she thought she imagined came back and stayed on his face.

"I-I'll do something _awful_."

Chell slowly limped forward.

For a second, Wheatley recoiled, the entire chassis recoiling with him. But Chell continued to move forward, her face set, keeping eye contact with him.

Her progress was slow, and the chamber large, but as she approached him, she saw his face soften. Wheatley's eyes widened. As she got closer, he moved towards her. The chassis slowly lowered so that he was at eye level with her.

She pressed her lips together and kept moving until she was right in front of him. The entire facility was silent; the air pressed around her, ringing faintly in her ears.

Chell looked up at him. Wheatley was slumping forward slightly, his hands unmoving and loose in his lap. He was eyeing her with a small tilt of his head, his eyes still wide, gentle, apologetic. His mouth was slightly open; as she stood in front of him, she watched as he mouthed something before growing still again.

She reached out and caressed his face with both hands. The corners of his mouth twitched upwards.

Just as he was slowly leaning forward, reaching towards her waist, head tilting and eyes closing, she grabbed his shoulders and began to pull.

It took Wheatley a minute to discern what she was trying to do.

It was only when the first wire came free with a sickening _pop_ that he began to scream and push back on her.

The chassis, combined with his already inhuman strength, made her go sliding back across the tile floor. She scrunched her face up and pulled as hard as she could, trying to bring him with her. She opened one eye to peer at him.

More wires popped out of his back, and he threw his head back and let out a howl of pain. Chell gritted her teeth, her breath coming in short puffs, and pulled harder, struggling to get proper leverage. Her grip nearly came loose as he leveled his gaze on her again, and she saw the frustration burning in his eyes, the anger, the pure hatred and resentment she thought, for a stuttering, frightening moment, that _her _stubbornness had induced in _him_. Maybe she had ruined him; maybe she had been the final straw after years of him being pushed aside. Maybe he hated her after all.

Then, as a few more wires popped out of him, genuine fear crept into his blue eyes as he stared at her, then a sort of desperation. She saw his eyes watering, and then his hands got a death grip on her wrists and he was using her to pull himself out.

"Chell, please," he whispered, his fingers struggling, and he locked hands with her and screamed,

"Manual override! Let me out! I don't want this!"

And with a bull-like roar, the chassis bucked, the last of the wires disconnected, GLaDOS's body spat Wheatley out, and he and Chell went flying, together, across the floor, where they eventually skidded to a halt.


	11. Chapter 11

She opened her eyes.

She became aware of a pressure on her chest, a cold surface pressing against her back, the grumbling of machinery winding down.

Wheatley had been disconnected, and he was now lying, dead, on top of her.

Chell struggled up; they must have spun when they landed, seeing as the quiet chassis was now behind her. The robot was lying limp against her; when she managed to throw his weight off, he slid, harmless as a broken doll, to the floor. Without thinking, she caught his head before it hit the ground.

A jolt of fear shot through her. She turned him over onto his back and lifted him, bridal-style, into her arms. His head lolled to the side, his eyes pitch-black screens. His mouth gaped open. His right hand twitched once, then went still.

It took her a second.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, she took a deep breath, and exhaled.

And began to cry.

Chell leaned down and touched her forehead to his, tears streaming down her face. Her gasps filled the silent chamber. The whole facility, in fact, was quiet; everything seemed to be focused on the woman weeping on the floor.

She had done this. If she hadn't been so stubborn. If she hadn't put him back in, if she hadn't tried to rip him out. If only.

A year ago, knowing he was dead might have been a blessing.

But now all she felt was a cold emptiness threatening to consume her. No more warm nights, no more tender fingers on rosy cheeks, no more endless chatter to liven up her dead house. No more trinkets.

No more cranes.

She had done this.

Her quiet gasps faded away into silence.

Then he began to tremble.

She sat up, blinking away tears, her eyes wide.

Wheatley's entire body shook. His eyes flickered, once, twice, three times, and then the screens turned on entirely. At first, his blue eyes were wide and unseeing. He blinked. The cameras in his eyes clicked.

_Click._

_ Click click._

His CPU whirred to life. He blinked again.

_Click click click._

He focused on her. Chell's breath caught in her throat.

There was a pause.

And then Wheatley smiled and sighed:

"_Love_!"

A wave of relief swept over her. She let out a shaky breath and smiled back.

He lunged forward and pulled her to him.

"Oh, love, I was so bloody _scared_. Not the first time in my life that I've felt that scared, mostly having to do with _Her_, but that was something else. They…it…they were telling me to…to test you and do terrible things to you so t-that science could get done and I didn't want to hurt you but it somehow felt…felt _good_ when you did things, anything at all, anything that could technically be considered…solving problems or something, I don't know. And I wanted it but I wanted _you_ too and I wanted to do such awful, awful things to you but I also was afraid to hurt you, and so I brought you here, I don't know what I was going to do but that…love, you have to believe me, that Itch was something else. No wonder you had…nightmares." He squeezed her tighter. Chell's arms snaked under his and squeezed back. "And when you started to pull," he said softly, "I got afraid and helped you pull me out…and now you're here and I don't feel like that anymore. And your leg is all healed and…heh. Go team."

He pulled away and gave her a weary smile. "Now we can go home, right?"

She smiled back.

Then she lifted her hand and smacked him across the face.

Wheatley rubbed his injured cheek; his entire face flushed a dull pink. He gave her a sheepish look. "I think I deserved that."

She snorted and nodded.

They sat across from each other. He gave her a shy smile. Chell sighed and half-smiled back.

His fingers walked towards her. She watched as his hand brushed against hers, before he took it in his hands. He looked up at her, then placed a gentle kiss in the center of her palm.

Wheatley nuzzled her hand and looked up at her. His smile was still shy, but his eyes had become sad and tear-logged. "I'm sorry."

Chell shook her head, then mouthed, _I'm sorry too._

He laughed. "Not sure if what you did was even half as bad as what I did, Lady."

She rolled her eyes and snorted again.

While his thumbs rubbed slow circles into her palm, she leaned forward and pecked his cheek. There would be time for reconciliation, punishment, new rules later.

He gave her a kiss of his own, then leaned back and grinned at her.

Then he focused on something behind her. The grin faded.

And he screamed.

Chell breathed in-

-and cold mechanical claws snatched her by the waist and lifted her into the air, and Wheatley tumbled out of her lap -

-and then she couldn't breathe at all.

The claws descended and dragged her backwards across the tile floor. Chell threw herself forward and scrabbled against the floor, desperately trying to find a handhold. Her hands were able to get a grip on one tile, and then the claws jerked her out of reach and the tile fell back into place.

She looked behind her, still desperately trying to cling to the floor and impede the claws' progress. They were dragging her towards the chassis; more specifically, they were dragging her towards the gaping red chasm underneath the chassis.

"ORIGINAL CORE REPLACEMENT CORRUPT," said the facility in that chirpy man's voice. "A REPLACEMENT CORE IS NEEDED TO CONTINUE."

Wheatley scrambled forward across the floor and grabbed her arms. He began to pull; the claws strained against her in the opposite direction.

"No!" he screamed, "Not her! She's _human_!"

"IN CASE OF EMERGENCY OR ROBOT APOCALYPSE," the man's voice went on, "A MODIFIED HUMAN SPECIMEN MAY ACT AS A REPLACEMENT CORE."

Chell looked up at Wheatley. He was staring at her with wide eyes; a few droplets of light streamed down his face.

She grabbed his wrists and used them to pull herself. The claws screeched and slowed.

"Anyone but her," he said quietly, then let out a loud sob and looked up at the chassis, still pulling. "Let her go! Take me instead! Take me back! Don't do this to her!"

"APERTURE SCIENCE IS SORRY, DEFECTIVE CORE-"

"We talked about this!"

"-_BUT SCIENCE MUST BE DONE."_

Wheatley gritted his teeth and looked down at her, the tears streaming down his face freely now. Chell blinked and gasped, and found tears running down her face, too. Their arms were shaking from the effort.

To have to inflict the same pain on him as he had inflicted on her was unthinkable. To live isolated from him, to test him, to feel the urge to trap, hurt kill; she had wanted that, once, when he was far in space above her and she was tasting rain water for the first time. She had wanted that when he had not left her alone in the wheat fields.

Wheatley pulled her harder, and Chell pulled on him. The claws continued to slow, and the entire chassis let out its inhuman, bull-like roar again. The tips of her toes were touching the edge of the pit.

And, perhaps, she had wanted that that morning when she had woken up and realized she needed to get out, get away, find some danger again. She had wanted him and the quiet safety he offered as far away from her as possible.

Chell breathed in-

-she didn't want that anymore-

-and the claws stopped, and Wheatley yanked her and pulled her out.

It happened quickly.

They moved, as fast as they could, towards the lift.

The chassis hissed; in the clean glass of the elevator, Chell saw the reflection of the claws shooting off after them.

Her broken leg was on fire. The world was spinning.

She thought he was screaming at her but she couldn't hear; all she heard was a tinny ringing in her ears, back again, blocking out the mechanical hell around her.

She saw his outstretched hand, and breathed in-

-and took it, and then he was pulling her into the elevator, and one claw shot past the closing doors and managed to take a swipe at Wheatley's face before the doors shut on its connecting tentacle and it fell, lifeless, to the floor.

Her bleeding hands.

The exposed circuitry of his face beyond the artificial skin.

Shooting past the turret room.

His stuttering voice, his shaking hand in hers.

The smell of wheat.

And two lovers, exhausted, finally stumbling out of the shed.

He collapsed.

The shed spat out their provisions bag behind her, and one very tattered brown camouflage jacket.

She leaned forward to examine him. The claw had done a fair amount of damage to his face: three tears in the skin showed blue wires and artificial muscle, things clearly not meant to be seen. One eye was cracked, and its light seemed to permanently bleed down his cheek. For once, he looked the robot that he _was._

Chell gave him a small kiss on a part of his cheek that hadn't been torn open.

He gave her a weak smile and shooed her away, then pushed himself up onto his hands. His arms were shaking.

"Not sure I'm much of a looker right now." Wheatley laughed. She raised an eyebrow.

Wheatley sighed and fell back against the ground. His good eye looked away. "Come on, love. I can feel the cut."

He breathed out, then laughed again. "Hurts like bloody anything. Worse than the time I burnt myself in the fire at home."

His good eye slid back to her. He blinked sleepily. "Do you remember that?" he asked, his voice growing fainter.

Chell brushed a hand against his cheek and nodded. Her smile was thin.

He yawned. "I…I think I'm…"

She pressed a finger against his lips and shook her head. She made a small "shh" noise.

Wheatley smiled gently.

He fell asleep.

And Chell slung their bag and his brown camouflage jacket over his shoulder, lifted him into her arms, and carried him forward.


	12. Chapter 12

He developed a strange form of narcolepsy.

Wheatley did not normally sleep, but Chell's ripping him out of the chassis altered his wiring now he fell asleep at fairly normal intervals, only to wake up again some time later. While she slept, she carried him, or slept herself.

She watched him carefully on the way back to make sure his memory was not failing.

She could tell it wasn't, because he sometimes woke up crying her name.

* * *

On the second day, she realized he had lost his glasses in the scuffle.

He moved to push them up his face, only to poke himself in the bridge of his nose, dangerously close to the cut.

He winced, his good eye filling with a strange pain. He looked away.

Chellmade a mental note then and there to find him some new glasses.

* * *

They came home. She ate. He watched her. They were quiet for a while. Wheatley fiddled with a piece of paper. Chell stared into the fire.

And when the sun went down, and the fire died, they found each other again.

He pulled her close and she let her hands roam, let herself remember the vast expanse of his artificial skin, now scarred from the facility. She let herself feel the barely-there hum of his CPU, the warm glow of his face.

The contours of his face around the cut. His broken cheek.

He re-memorized her, too, let his mouth trace familiar, comforting patterns across her skin, made her sigh and curl her toes and bring him ever-closer.

"Sorry," he murmured, over and over again, always different: sometimes high-pitched and needy, sometimes sobbed, sometimes whispered in the heat of ecstasy. And she mouthed apologies right back, pulled him against her and moved with him in a way that let him know he was safe, this was her apologizing for bringing him into this mess, her forgiving him, her _loving _him, and there he was, loving back, watching her with that same gentle look he gave her so many ages ago.

He would never frighten her again. She would never leave.

"Chell," he whispered, over and over, gentle as a lullaby. "Chell, Chell, Chell."

_Wheatley, Wheatley, Wheatley._

They wept.

* * *

Something stirred.

Chell opened her eyes.

She had fallen asleep on the couch with him, the last time she remembered. Now something in the house was rustling. The sun was just rising.

He wasn't on the couch with her anymore.

She struggled into a sitting position, and saw him, wrapped up in his brown camouflage coat, trying to negotiate a large bag through the front door.

Chell's eyes widened. She swung her cast down onto the carpeted floor; it landed with a muffled _thump._

Wheatley froze. His shoulders hunched up by his ears.

She rose to her feet and limped to him. Wheatley didn't move.

Her hand brushed his shoulder gently. He shivered and turned around.

His dead eye glinted in the morning light. Despite herself, Chell stared at the shattered glass, transfixed. Her hands flexed around the lapels of his coat. She was nude save for her cast, and she shivered; he huddled closer to her, even though his hunched shoulders and wide eye screamed fear.

His lips trembled. Something nudged her stomach; his good eye looked down at it, then back up at her. She looked down.

He was holding a paper crane.

Chell looked up at him, her eyes filling with tears. He smiled gently; a few droplets of light spilled down his unmarred cheek.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered, his voice thick. The smile disappeared.

Before she could stop herself, she snatched the crane out of his hands and threw her arms around him, squeezing him as tight as she could. His coat still smelled of the wheat fields.

There was a tense pause while she cried into his shoulder.

The bag fell onto the ground, and within the next second his arms were around her, too, squeezing her close to him.

"Oh, love," he breathed. "You're so patient with me."

She released him and took one of his hands. Limping, she lead him to the couch, and pulled him down so they could sit next to each other, legs touching.

Wheatley looked down at his shaking hands. She cradled the crane in her lap.

"I didn't save you," he said after a long pause. "That was _you, _doing all that. You healed your leg."

She shook her head.

"No, love," Wheatley sighed, "It was you. I didn't want to give you the cure."

He put his head in his hands. "But I _did_, then I didn't, and so I got cross with you, I got _beyond_ cross, let's be honest. And that…"

Wheatley sat up and looked away. His voice dropped to a choked whisper. "I'll do that again, some day. I did that to you, once, the time I can't remember but the one you had nightmares about. I said I wouldn't. And then I did it to you again, just now at the facility."

He looked up at her, tears now falling freely down his face. "What's to stop me from doing it again?"

She pursed her lips. His voice grew high-pitched and desperate.

"Love, you're everything I have, and I…even then, I do things to hurt you, and I don't know what to do except…except _leave, _I shouldn't have…I shouldn't have stayed this long."

Chell put a finger to his lips. He looked up at her.

She shook her head and pointed to herself.

"You didn't-"

She placed her finger to his lips again and gestured to her broken leg. She winced and pointed to him.

_I hurt you, too, _she mouthed.

He looked away. "If…if I hadn't been a bloody _moron_…"

There was a heavy pause.

Chell reached over and brushed his hand. He didn't move.

She took his larger hand in hers and turned it over.

Then she placed the crane in his hand.

Wheatley's head whipped around to look.

Then he looked up at her.

She gave him a small smile.

"You…?" His voice trailed off into a choked gasp.

She nodded.

"Even when…? You d-don't think I'll…?"

Chell shook her head. After a few seconds, she levied a hard gaze on him. He shrunk away, but held it.

"Point taken."

She sighed and rested her head on his shoulder. He nuzzled her hair.

"Start again?" he asked.

That day, they went out and found him new glasses.

* * *

_So don't think that I'm pushing you away_

_When you're the one that I've kept closest._

-the xx, "Crystalised"

**END**


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